49 
And as I gaze upon the works of His hand, I am furnished with evidence 
that, though He has not made Himself visible, He has scattered around us 
proofs of what He is and does, and thus gives us impressions of Him which 
He wishes us to seize and to retain. Then He shows us in another way that 
which He cannot show us in that way. What are those moral principles 
by which all His mighty energies are guided and controlled ? I take it to be 
one of the grandest things in the revelation of the Bible that it represents 
Him as bringing the human mind into contact with the divine energies in 
such a way as that he who has seen the Son has seen the Father ; and we 
know on authority that in the working of that life we see the hidden life. 
Mr. Reddie. — Greatly as I have sympathized with some of the remarks of 
Dr. Protheroe Smith and Mr. Wain wright, I cannot help saying that I think 
both those gentlemen have been led away from the precise subject before us ; 
and I feel it is of the greatest importance that we should observe some sort 
of precision in our discussions. I am sure that great interest was felt in the 
remarks made by both those gentlemen ; and it was only on that account 
that I did not rise to order very early after Dr. Protheroe Smith began to 
speak. Mr. Wheatley in his paper has not been discussing that highest life 
of all — the spiritual life — which proceeds especially and as it were afresh 
from the Creator to the soul of man, but ordinary and common life as once 
communicated to all the organic creatures of God’s creation. The discussion, 
therefore, is not one which can be based upon metaphysical considerations, 
or a spiritual philosophy, but upon natural physical science. But with 
regard to one remark which fell from Dr. Smith : he said that a person 
who might enter this room could only be conscious of the presence of 
the rest through seeing us, and that he would only be conscious of the 
nature of existent things through the same means. Now, I venture to differ 
emphatically from Dr. Smith as to this. I venture to say that if a blind 
man had been present and heard the papers read to-night, and the remarks 
which have since been made, he would have been much more conscious of 
the presence of intelligent beings around him, from his hearing and intelli- 
gence, than others could possibly be from eyesight alone. Hearing would 
thus afford a better proof of the existence of intelligent man than seeing, and 
so the argument from sight falls to the ground. With regard to the paper 
itself, I will point out what appears to be a misapprehension on the part of 
the author, where he introduces a quotation from Dr. Odling. Mr. Wheatley 
observes, “ Speaking of vital force, Dr. Odling says, ‘ So far as I can make 
out, it seems to be a sort of internal, intransferable, immeasurable, self- 
originating power.’ — I believe it to be internal, not intransferable ; immea- 
surable, not self-originating.” I have not had the advantage of reading 
Dr. Odling’s book, but, judging merely from that short quotation, I should be 
inclined to think that Dr. Odling means not that life is self-originated, but 
self-originatmy, in the sense that life is a power that develops and so originates 
growth, for instance, which is a power that you do not find existing in the 
inorganic world. The most nearly analogous thing to this in the inorganic 
world would, perhaps, be found in the case of certain crystals with regard to 
YOL. III. E 
